We all know different products and contexts require different strategic thinking. B2B SaaS and subscriptions is an important product category, and John Pearce has been working on it for a long time.
Listen below to our conversation and read my takeaways.
Takeaways
- We went deep into John’s repeatable process, that he calls “The power of 3”
- When doing research, use 3 different categories of sources. For example: customer feedback, market research, surveys. And try to identify up to “3 trends”
- Try to derive a mission, a sort of north star.
- Doin mission at team level helps make it more actionable
- Follow the trends with “3 key problems”
- If you can solve 3 important customer problems per year, it will be a success
- When doing research, use 3 different categories of sources. For example: customer feedback, market research, surveys. And try to identify up to “3 trends”
- John also uses semester or quarterly strategy review
- We covered the close relation between company strategy and the product strategy (for example, selecting at company level geography, or company type to focus on)
- One example on how to collaborate between product leaders at this level: everyone researches and brings their 3 trends across the organization.
- We discussed B2B vs B2C, and the key differences highlighted were around speed to value and speed to churn (related to sell cycles).
- When the strategy is not good, sales request becomes a worse problem. Your strategy needs to be clear to the sales people to make everyone more aligned and successful.
I hope you enjoyed it! If you think it may be useful to others, sharing is much appreciated!